The number of people living in urban areas has tripled in the last 50 years, meaning when a major natural disaster such as an earthquake strikes a city, more lives are in danger. Meanwhile, the strength and frequency of extreme weather events has increased--a trend set to continue as the climate warms. That is spurring efforts around the world to develop a new generation of earthquake monitoring and climate forecasting systems to make detecting and responding to disasters quicker, cheaper, and more accurate than ever. On Nov. 6, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, the Global Initiative on Resilience to Natural Hazards through AI Solutions will meet for the first time. The new United Nations initiative aims to guide governments, organizations, and communities in using AI for disaster management.

Locals and emergency responders are only just beginning to assess the total damage incurred from Hurricane Milton, but one early example of the historic storm's intensity is already on clear display. In the early hours of October 10th, extreme weather documentarian Brandon Clement uploaded nine minutes of ground and drone footage that showcased the destructive effects of 100 mph sustained winds on St. Petersburg's Tropicana Field, home to MLB's Tampa Bay Rays. As local news outlet WFLA explained on Thursday, the baseball team's home field was topped by fabric paneling that served as its roofing, an estimated two-thirds of which is now either shredded or gone completely. It's currently unclear if Tropicana Field suffered serious interior damage, but Clement's aerial images reveal substantial amounts of debris scattering the field, stands, and surrounding areas that includes what appears to be hundreds of cots. City officials previously intended to use the Rays' stadium as a hub for emergency worker coordinating efforts, but it's unclear how the facility's current state will affect response logistics in the coming days.

On Wednesday evening, Hurricane Milton will become the fifth hurricane in 2024 to make landfall in the mainland U.S. As storms like this one grow more frequent and intense, artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly central role in efforts by meteorologists and other scientists to track these storms and mitigate their harms. For years, meteorologists have built complex forecasting models of storms based on wind speeds, temperature, humidity and other factors, and recorded via readings from planes, buoys and satellites. But these models can take hours to produce updated forecasts. Machine learning models, on the other hand, draw upon vast knowledge of the earth's atmosphere and data from how previous storms have unfolded. They excel at pattern recognition, teasing out trends that most humans can't discern in a fraction of the time.